Cydia

George "GeoHot" Hotz has asked for help - in a tweet yesterday - from the jailbreak community in winning the DARPA Network Challenge. If he wins, he says, he will create an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS.

The DARPA Network Challenge is a competition that explores the role the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

In two separate tweets today, GeoHot made his offer:

at 9AM EST tomorrow, I will be asking for all of your help..if you come through for me, i'll make you an untethered jailbreak. also $1000.00

at 9AM EST tomorrow, I need you all to trend something and do something, which will be revealed then..big rewards are in order if this works

A later tweet also said, "i wouldn't feel right with a distributed approach since it has to stay up for months and is commercial for me"

The blackra1n exploit GeoHot had worked out the new iPod touch and the newer iPhone 3GS devices require the phone to tethered jailbreak. A complete untethered jailbreak would require a new exploit, something that would defeat Apple's efforts to outfox jailbreakers by releasing new bootrom code.

GeoHot requests people to help by finding the balloons and retweeting the #dudeitsaballoon topic on Twitter to make it a top trend.